The Blurred Silhouette

In the end, Cheong-hyun just stood by the door, staring into the invisible space. The booming sounds from inside began to change.

The moment the door opened, the beast locked its festering eyes onto him. For that brief second, it stared directly at Cheong-hyun and whimpered. Do monsters practice self-harm, too? Do they commit suicide? He once read a line in a book stating that animals throw themselves off cliffs when they lose their homes.

The beast slammed its head against the wall in the exact same way. It was as if it had no other way to vent its rage, choosing death to show its despair and disgust.

It was self-harm. It was a suicide attempt repeated countless times.

Cheong-hyun silently placed his hand against the source of the noise. The vibration tore through his palm. At some point, his heart began to race uncontrollably.

A strange, suffocating weight settled heavily in his chest, but he couldn’t define what it was.

Seo Won-woo finally stepped out about an hour later. The treatment session must have been draining, as he stumbled and leaned against the wall for support.

Cheong-hyun, who had been standing by the door like a statue, raised his head and turned around. Seo Won-woo closed his exhausted eyes and spoke weakly to Kim Byeong-ho.

“Manager… I need to r-rest until the next appointment… I’m exhausted.”

“You only worked for an hour, so stop shaking. Another VIP is arriving in two hours, so fix your condition by then.”

Seo Won-woo closed his lips gloomily. He nodded with hunched shoulders and shuffled down the hallway. Kim Byeong-ho grabbed Cheong-hyun’s clothes roughly and followed him. Their shoes scraped against the thick carpet with every step.

Cheong-hyun tracked the edge of the carpet with his eyes. A high-pitched opera song was now blasting through the corridor. The piercing, screeching notes grated on his ears.

When the screaming high note finally ended and left a sudden silence, Cheong-hyun stopped walking. He asked:

“…Where is the restroom?”

Kim Byeong-ho and Seo Won-woo turned to look at him at the same time. The subordinate Guide looked too, making it three pairs of eyes on him. Cheong-hyun asked again.

“I need to use the restroom.”

“This floor is strictly for VIPs. Go downstairs and do your business.”

“Just tell me where it is, and I will be right back.”

“Didn’t you hear me tell you to go downstairs? Are you completely deaf now?”

Despite the harsh insults, Cheong-hyun did not budge. Seo Won-woo watched him with an anxious expression. Angry shouting immediately filled the hallway. The subordinate Guide, who had been watching the scene nervously, finally stepped forward.

“Manager, it looks like an emergency. I’ll take him there. It’s right ahead, so please let us go quickly.”

Kim Byeong-ho ran a hand through his hair in frustration before sharply jerking his chin toward the end of the hall. The Guide gestured to Cheong-hyun and turned the corner. Halfway down the corridor, a restroom came into view.

He pushed Cheong-hyun inside and hurried him.

“I’ll wait out here, so be quick. You really need to come out fast.”

The man was completely drained from assisting Seo Won-woo. He wiped his sweat, slid down against the wall, and closed his eyes. A long sigh escaped his lips.

Whoosh—

Cheong-hyun walked over to the sink, turned on the tap, and pretended to wash his arms. He looked at the gauze he put on this morning and saw blood seeping through. He clamped his mouth shut against the sharp pain, pulled out some paper towels, and wiped the blood away.

Why is my recovery this slow? When he lived his past life, he always had bruises and cuts, but the pain usually faded and the flesh healed within a day or two. But nothing came easy with this body.

After cleaning himself up, he turned off the water. The Guide waiting outside had fallen asleep against the wall with his head down. Cheong-hyun walked right past him and slipped out the door.

He slowed his pace and walked in the opposite direction of Kim Byeong-ho. The plush carpet swallowed his footsteps once again. With every step he took, the sound of something slamming against the wall grew louder.

“…….”

Even now, Cheong-hyun wasn’t sure if he was making the right choice.

Originally, he had no intention of coming back here. He had closed his ears and eyes to ignore it. What changed his mind was the sound of weeping that filled the silence when the opera music stopped.

And finally, the sudden flashback he experienced the moment he stood before Lee Do-han. The scenes flashing before his eyes felt like an extension of the memories he triggered when he ran into him in the lobby.

[This guy turned out to be much more amusing than I thought.]

The man smiling like a scene from a black-and-white photo was Lee Do-han. The hand offering him flowers must have belonged to ‘Lee Tae-eon,’ who now inhabited Lee Cheong-hyun’s body. But something was different. Unlike that day in the lobby, a bright blue sky appeared through his whitening vision. And at the edge of that view was a sharp, protruding balcony railing.

He needed to check if he was truly losing his mind. If he wasn’t insane, he had to know if those memories were real.

He retraced his steps and followed the sound. His endless walk came to a halt right in front of the firmly closed double doors.

Cheong-hyun hesitated, holding his thin hand out in front of the door where the violent slamming echoed. His fingertips trembled.

Seeing things others can’t see, and hearing things others can’t hear. When he was a child, he often wondered if it was all just a delusion.

As he hesitated, time continued to tick away. It felt like someone would run down the hallway at any moment, grab him by the hair, and drag him away. Feeling a cold shiver run down his spine, Cheong-hyun grabbed the handle and turned it.

The door opened soundlessly, and a heavy wave of tobacco smoke hit his face. The room was still dark, and the thick smoke felt suffocating.

As he took a step into the room, he saw the terrifying, feral eyes of the beast piercing through the gloomy air.

“…….”

There was no way this was fake. It wasn’t a delusion or a mistake. The smell was too real, and the sight was burned too clearly into his eyes.

The monster’s body was a bloody mess, covered in deep wounds from self-harm. Beyond its massive frame, a man sat buried in an armchair with his chin resting on his hand, fast asleep. The secretary was nowhere to be seen.

“…Why do you keep… slamming your body like that?”

Cheong-hyun looked up into the air. A massive jaw, large enough to swallow an elephant whole, approached him.

Can this even be called an animal? The creature stumbling from the drugs was far too fierce and giant to be compared to any ordinary beast. Its sharp teeth were large enough to pierce a crocodile in a single bite. A rotten stench mixed heavily with the sharp smell of blood.

These were old wounds. Its body was covered entirely in festering, raw flesh, looking completely neglected.

Cheong-hyun locked eyes with the monster’s dark pupils. They were pitch-black, and the light inside them had faded out. It looked like a flame about to die.

“Don’t… do that again. If you act like this next time… I won’t look at you again.”

The creature approached and sniffed him, shoving its snout against Cheong-hyun’s stomach. It nudged his belly as if trying to gauge whether he was food or not. His fingertips shook, and his breathing faltered. The beast was so massive that he felt like he was standing before a giant man-eating shark in the middle of an open ocean.

The monster kept tracing and tracking Cheong-hyun’s scent.

As Cheong-hyun watched the creature, his body suddenly froze. Just a few steps ahead, the man sat completely still, looking as if he were dead. Sleeping with his chin resting on his hand, he looked as flawless and delicate as a piece of art sculpted by a god.

Though he looked like porcelain, he was vividly alive, breathing with a raw energy. Yet right now, he looked like a corpse that had swallowed a cup of poison.

Suddenly, Cheong-hyun felt his heart hammer violently. The moment the rhythm became painful—

Flash—

His vision instantly turned stark white, like a spark exploding. Cheong-hyun frowned and stumbled backward. Another vivid afterimage flashed across his mind like a scene from a flashback.

Through his blurry vision, he saw people screaming. The burning pain rushing through his crushed chest hurt far worse than the hot blood pooling at the back of his head. The sky looked cruel in its perfect shade of blue. And at the edge of his vision, a single balcony railing caught his eye.

Someone whispered:

‘That’s right. I jumped from right there. But… I never actually intended to jump.’

Even so, the man whispered to himself through ragged breaths, feeling as though he had been possessed by something back then. ‘Lee Tae-eon,’ who had spent his life inside Cheong-hyun’s shell, thought to himself how pathetic he looked stepping onto that railing.

“Ugh….”

The man’s sheer misery pierced straight into Cheong-hyun’s own heart, causing him to squeeze his hands tight. It was just a few plucked flowers. If the man had simply accepted them with a thank you, a compliment, or even total silence before turning away, he would have remembered it for the rest of his life.

Instead, the man inflicted a wound deeper than any nail, knife, or gun could ever manage.

[This guy turned out to be much more amusing than I thought.]

In the beginning, he had smiled with enough warmth to make his heart race. So, the man who handed him the flowers had waited foolishly with trembling fingers, completely unaware that it was all a mistake.

[A Guide without detoxification abilities shouldn’t even be counted as human.]

Following that low, smooth voice, the man had crushed a cigarette under his leather shoe. Furthermore, the dark, mocking look in his eyes—

[Why is this thing here pretending to be a human being?]

It was not a look meant for a person.